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A UNIVERSE OF SELF-REPLICATING CODE

A UNIVERSE OF SELF-REPLICATING CODE

"What we're missing now, on another level, is not just biology, but cosmology. People treat the digital universe as some sort of metaphor, just a cute word for all these products. The universe of Apple, the universe of Google, the universe of Facebook, that these collectively constitute the digital universe, and we can only see it in human terms and what does this do for us?

"We're missing a tremendous opportunity. We're asleep at the switch because it's not a metaphor. In 1945 we actually did create a new universe. This is a universe of numbers with a life of their own, that we only see in terms of what those numbers can do for us. Can they record this interview? Can they play our music? Can they order our books on Amazon? If you cross the mirror in the other direction, there really is a universe of self-reproducing digital code. When I last checked, it was growing by five trillion bits per second. And that's not just a metaphor for something else. It actually is. It's a physical reality."

GEORGE DYSON is a Science Historian; Author, Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe; Darwin Among the Machines.

Introduction

In June of 1998, Edge published two pieces in an attempt to get at the big issues behind the news in the technology world: the then current Microsoft-Justice Department litigation. "Code" was a conversation between science historian and third culture thinker George Dyson and myself. Dyson argued that "turning this into a political issue-Government versus Microsoft-is diverting attention from something much more significant: the growth of multi-cellular forms of organization on the Net. ... The development of multi-cellular operating systems is a separate issue from the question of whether what Microsoft does is fair or legal in a business sense".

"The analogy with biological organisms is highly tenuous—as Edge readers will be flooding your inbox to point out. It's just the beginnings of something, in a faintly metazoan sense. The operating system used to be the system that operated a computer. Now it is becoming something else."

"Now, there are moves afoot to get the same code-Windows, or Windows CE, or Windows NT or whatever, not to mention underlying protocols-running everywhere. Running on your desktop, running on your network, running in your car, running in your toaster, running on the credit card you have in your wallet-it's all going to run this same code. And if it's not Windows it'll be something else. The thing is, it's happening. Which is very much what's gone on in the world of biology. In biology there is one operating system, and it's the one we're stuck with-the DNA/RNA operating system. All living organisms, with very rare exceptions, run that same system. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but ..."

This was followed by "Code II", a debate between complexity researcher J. Doyne Farmer of the SantaFe Institute, and computer scientist Charles Simonyi, the chief software architect at Microsoft which addressed subjects such as monopoly as well as the effect of corporate control of society's replication machinery for ideas.

What has changed in the past fourteen years is that the analogy with biological organisms is no longer highly tenuous. In fact, this conversation is at the forefront of some of the most interesting intellectual conversations today. I am pleased to note that in this regard, Edge is leading the way. And, in this regard, nobody is thinking about these issues more deeply than George Dyson.

For a rich background on these topics, revisit the following Edge Features, Seminars, and Master Classes and browse through the videos and texts...

[GEORGE DYSON:] When I started looking at the beginnings of the modern digital universe—at the origin of this two-dimensional address matrix—I became interested in the question of what had been done with it at the beginning. Of course, one of the things was the work on the hydrogen bomb.

Another thing that surprised and delighted me was to find that a Norwegian-Italian mathematical biologist and viral geneticist, Nils Aall Barricelli, had tried to come to Princeton in 1951, as soon as he heard this machine was being built. He had trouble getting a visa, so he finally shows up in early 1953 when the machine is running, and immediately begins these experiments, to see if he could inoculate this two-dimensional matrix with random strings of one-dimensional numbers that can self-replicate and cross-breed, and do all the things that we know that code does in biology, and see what happens.

And he observed. He was an observational biologist. He saw all sorts of behavior that he read all sorts of biological implications into. He was way too far ahead of the time, so no one paid attention and this was forgotten.

We now live in a world where everything he dreamed of really did happen. And, for some reason, von Neumann never publicized Barricelli's work. I don't know if there was a personal rivalry or what happened, but von Neumann died, and his papers on self-reproducing automata were published posthumously [edited by Arthur W. Burks] and there was no mention of Barricelli. Part of it was this fear that it really would provoke the public. They called computers "electronic brains" at that time. It was scary enough that we might be building machines that would think. But the idea of producing artificial life was even more Frankenstein-like. I think that's one reason we never heard about that.

Just as we later worried about recombinant DNA, what if these things escaped? What would they do to the world? Could this be the end of the world as we know it if these self-replicating numerical creatures got loose?

But, we now live in a world where theydid get loose—a world increasingly run by self-replicating strings of code. Everything we love and use today is, in a lot of ways, self-reproducing exactly as Turing, von Neumann, and Barricelli prescribed. It's a very symbiotic relationship: the same way life found a way to use the self-replicating qualities of these polynucleotide molecules to the great benefit of life as a whole, there's no reason life won't use the self-replicating abilities of digital code, and that's what's happening. If you look at what people like Craig Venter and the thousand less-known companies are doing, we're doing exactly that, from the bottom up.

What's, in a way, missing in today's world is more biology of the Internet. More people like Nils Barricelli to go out and look at what's going on, not from a business or what's legal point of view, but just to observe what's going on.

The defining moment for me was when I went back to Princeton to visit the scene of all of this. I believe in revisiting the physical scene of something, because you get cues that just aren't there from looking at documents. I went down in the basement to find the room where they had started building this machine in 1946. It's the storeroom in the basement next to the boiler room at the Institute for Advanced Study. It was the worst possible room in the building. I went back there in 2005, 60 years later, and it happened to be the main server room for the Institute. The Institute for Advanced Study is now connected to the entire rest of the world, and they had 54 megabits per second of fiber-optic data coming in and out.

When the engineer there on duty gave me a tour the most remarkable thing was an entire server, very high-end, very sophisticated—a few years ago, we would have called it a supercomputer. It was sitting there on the top shelf, and all the fiber-optic lines were going through it, and its sole, 24 hour a day job, was monitoring all the data coming in, trying to keep out self-replicating strings of code—trying to guard against what Barricelli had been trying to do at the beginning. So clearly, Barricelli's experiment was a tremendous success. It's almost so successful we can't see it, because it's happening all around us.

What's, in a way, missing in today's world is more biology of the Internet. More people like Nils Barricelli to go out and look at what's going on, not from a business or what's legal point of view, but just to observe what's going on.

Many of these things we read about in the front page of the newspaper every day, about what's proper or improper, or ethical or unethical, really concern this issue of autonomous self-replicating codes. What happens if you subscribe to a service and then as part of that service, unbeknownst to you, a piece of self-replicating code inhabits your machine, and it goes out and does something else? Who is responsible for that? And we're in an increasingly gray zone as to where that's going.

The most virulent codes, of course, are parasitic, just as viruses are. They're codes that go out and do things, particularly codes that go out and gather money. Which is essentially what these things like cookies do. They are small strings of code that go out and gather valuable bits of information, and they come back and sell it to somebody. It's a very interesting situation. You would have thought this was inconceivable 20 or 30 years ago. Yet, you probably wouldn't have to go … well, we're in New York, not San Francisco, but in San Francisco, you wouldn't have to go five blocks to find five or 10 companies whose income is based on exactly that premise. And doing very well at it.

Walking over here today, just three blocks from my hotel, the street right out front is blocked off. There are 20 police cars out there and seven satellite news vans, because Apple is releasing a new code. They're couching it as releasing a new piece of hardware, but it's really a new gateway into the closed world of Apple's code. And that's enough to block human traffic.

Why is Apple one of the world's most valuable companies? It's not only because their machines are so beautifully designed, which is great and wonderful, but because those machines represent a closed numerical system. And they're making great strides in expanding that system. It's no longer at all odd to have a Mac laptop. It's almost the normal thing.

But I'd like to take this to a different level, if I can change the subject... Ten or 20 years ago I was preaching that we should look at digital code as biologists: the Darwin Among the Machines stuff. People thought that was crazy, and now it's firmly the accepted metaphor for what's going on. And Kevin Kelly quoted me in Wired, he asked me for my last word on what companies should do about this. And I said, "Well, they should hire more biologists."

But what we're missing now, on another level, is not just biology, but cosmology. People treat the digital universe as some sort of metaphor, just a cute word for all these products. The universe of Apple, the universe of Google, the universe of Facebook, that these collectively constitute the digital universe, and we can only see it in human terms and what does this do for us?

We're missing a tremendous opportunity. We're asleep at the switch because it's not a metaphor. In 1945 we actuallydidcreate a new universe. This is a universe of numbers with a life of their own, that we only see in terms of what those numbers can do for us. Can they record this interview? Can they play our music? Can they order our books on Amazon? If you cross the mirror in the other direction, there really is a universe of self-reproducing digital code. When I last checked, it was growing by five trillion bits per second. And that's not just a metaphor for something else. It actually is. It's a physical reality.

Very few people are looking at this digital universe in an objective way. Danny Hillis is one of the few people who is. His comment, made exactly 30 years ago in 1982, was that "memory locations are just wires turned sideways in time". That's just so profound. That should be engraved on the wall.

We're still here at the big bang of this thing, and we're not studying it enough. Who's the cosmologist really looking at this in terms of what it might become in 10,000 years? What's it going to be in 100 years? Here we are at the very beginning and we just may simply not be asking the right questions about what's going on. Try looking at it from the other side, not from our side as human beings. Scientists are the people who can do that kind of thing. You can look at viruses from the point of view of a virus, not from the point of view of someone getting sick.

Very few people are looking at this digital universe in an objective way. Danny Hillis is one of the few people who is. His comment, made exactly 30 years ago in 1982, was that "memory locations are just wires turned sideways in time". That's just so profound. That should be engraved on the wall. Because we don't realize that there is this very different universe that does not have the same physics as our universe. It's completely different physics. Yet, from the perspective of that universe, there is physics, and we have almost no physicists looking at it, as to what it's like. And if we want to understand the sort of organisms that would evolve in that totally different universe, you have to understand the physics of the world in which they are in. It's like looking for life on another planet. Danny has that perspective. Most people say just, "well, a wire is a wire. It's not a memory location turned sideways in time." You have to have that sort of relativistic view of things.

We are still so close to the beginning of this explosion that we are still immersed in the initial fireball. Yet, in that short period of time, for instance, it was not long ago that to transfer money electronically you had to fill out paper forms on both ends and then wait a day for your money to be transferred. And, in a very few years, it's a dozen years or so, most of the money in the world is moving electronically all the time.

The best example of this is what we call the flash crash of May 6th, two years ago, when suddenly, the whole system started behaving unpredictably. Large amounts of money were lost in milliseconds, and then the money came back, and we quietly (although the SEC held an investigation) swept it under the rug and just said, "well, it recovered. Things are okay." But nobody knows what happened, or most of us don't know.

There was a great Dutch documentary—Money and Speed: Inside the Black Box—where they spoke to someone named Eric Scott Hunsader who actually had captured the data on a much finer time scale, and there was all sorts of very interesting stuff going on. But it's happening so quickly that it's below what our normal trading programs are able to observe, they just aren't accounting for those very fast things. And this could be happening all around us—not just in the world of finance. We would not necessarily even perceive it, that there's a whole world of communication that's not human communication. It's machines communicating with machines. And they may be communicating money, or information that has other meaning—but if it is money, we eventually notice it. It's just the small warm pond sitting there waiting for the spark.

It's an unbelievably interesting time to be a digital biologist or a digital physicist, or a digital chemist. A good metaphor is chemistry. We're starting to address code by template, rather than by numerical location—the way biological molecules do.

We're living in a completely different world. The flash crash was an example: you could have gone out for a cup of coffee and missed the whole thing, and come back and your company lost a billion dollars and got back 999 million, while you were taking your lunch break. It just happened so fast, and it spread so quickly.

So, yes, the fear scenario is there, that some malevolent digital virus could bring down the financial system. But on the other hand, the miracle of this flash crash was not that it happened, but that it recovered so quickly. Yet, in those milliseconds, somebody made off with a lot of money. We still don't know who that was, and maybe we don't want to know.

The reason we're here today (surrounded by this expanding digital universe) is because in 1936, or 1935, this oddball 23-year-old undergraduate student, Alan Turing, developed this theoretical framework to understand a problem in mathematical logic, and the way he solved that problem turned out to establish the model for all this computation. And I believe we wold have arrived here, sooner or later, without Alan Turing or John von Neumann, but it was Turing who developed the one-dimensional model, and von Neumann who developed the two-dimensional implementation, for this increasingly three-dimensional digital universe in which everything we do is immersed. And so, the next breakthrough in understanding will also I think come from some oddball. It won't be one of our great, known scientists. It'll be some 22-year-old kid somewhere who makes more sense of this.

It's an unbelievably interesting time to be a digital biologist or a digital physicist, or a digital chemist. A good metaphor is chemistry. We're starting to address code by template, rather than by numerical location—the way biological molecules do.

But, we're going back to biology, and of course, it's impossible not to talk about money, and all these other ways that this impacts our life as human beings. What I was trying to say is that this digital universe really is so different that the physics itself is different. If you want to understand what types of life-like or self-reproducing forms would develop in a universe like that, you actually want to look at the sort of physics and chemistry of how that universe is completely different from ours. An example is how not only its time scale but how time operates is completely different, so that things can be going on in that world in microseconds that suddenly have a real effect on ours.

Again, money is a very good example, because money really is a sort of a gentlemen's agreement to agree on where the money is at a given time. Banks decide, well, this money is here today and it's there tomorrow. And when it's being moved around in microseconds, you can have a collapse, where suddenly you hit the bell and you don't know where the money is. And then everybody's saying, "Where's the money? What happened to it?" And I think that's what happened. And there are other recent cases where it looks like a huge amount of money just suddenly disappeared, because we lost the common agreement on where it is at an exact point in time. We can't account for those time periods as accurately as the computers can.

One number that's interesting, and easy to remember, was in the year 1953, there were 53 kilobytes of high-speed memory on planet earth. This is random access high-speed memory. Now you can buy those 53 kilobytes for an immeasurably small, thousandth of one cent or something. If you draw the graph, it's a very nice, clean graph. That's sort of Moore's Law; that it's doubling. It has a doubling time that's surprisingly short, and no end in sight, no matter what the technology does. We're doubling the number of bits in a extraordinarily short time.

What's the driver today? You want one word? It's advertising. And, you may think advertising is very trivial, and of no real importance, but I think it's the driver. If you look at what most of these codes are doing, they're trying to get the audience, trying to deliver the audience. The money is flowing as advertising.

And we have never seen that. Or I mean, we have seen numbers like that, in epidemics or chain reactions, and there's no question it's a very interesting phenomenon. But still, it's very hard not to just look at it from our point of view. What does it mean to us? What does it mean to my investments? What does it mean to my ability to have all the music I want on my iPhone? That kind of thing. But there's something else going on. We're seeing a fraction of one percent of it, and there's this other 99.99 percent that people just aren't looking at.

The beginning of this was driven by two problems. The problem of nuclear weapons design, and the problem of code breaking were the two drivers of the dawn of this computational universe. There were others, but those were the main ones.

What's the driver today? You want one word? It's advertising. And, you may think advertising is very trivial, and of no real importance, but I think it's the driver. If you look at what most of these codes are doing, they're trying to get the audience, trying to deliver the audience. The money is flowing as advertising.

And it is interesting that Samuel Butler imagined all this in 1863, and then in his bookErewhon. And then 1901, before he died, he wrote a draft for "Erewhon Revisited." In there, he called out advertising, saying that advertising would be the driving force of these machines evolving and taking over the world. Even then at the close of 19th century England, he saw advertising as the way we would grant power to the machines.

If you had to say what's the most powerful algorithm set loose on planet earth right now? Originally, yes, it was the Monte Carlo code for doing neutron calculations. Now it's probably the AdWords algorithm. And the two are related: if you look at the way AdWords works, it is a Monte Carlo process. It's a sort of statistical sampling of the entire search space, and a monetizing of it, which as we know, is a brilliant piece of work. And that's not to diminish all the other great codes out there.

We live in a world where we measure numbers of computers in billions, and numbers of what we call servers, which are the equivalent of in the old days, of what would be called mainframes. Those are in the millions, hundreds of millions.

Two of the pioneers of this—to single out only two pioneers—were John Von Neumann and Alan Turing. If they were here today Turing would be 100. Von Neumann would be 109. I think they would understand what's going on immediately—it would take them a few minutes, if not a day, to figure out, to understand what was going on. And, they both died working on biology, and I think they would be immediately fascinated by the way biological code and digital code are now intertwined. Von Neumann's consuming passion at the end was self-reproducing automata. And Alan Turing was interested in the question of how molecules could self-organize to produce organisms.

The question of how and when humans are going to expand into the universe, the space travel question, is, in my view, almost rendered obsolete by this growth of a digitally-coded biology, because those digital organisms—maybe they don't exist now, but as long as the system keeps going, they're inevitable—can travel at the speed of light. They can propagate. They're going to be so immeasurably far ahead that maybe humans will be dragged along with it.

They would be, on the other hand, astonished that we're still running their machines, that we don't have different computers. We're still just running your straight Von Neumann/Turing machine with no real modification. So they might not find our computers all that interesting, but they would be diving into the architecture of the Internet, and looking at it.

In both cases, they would be amazed by the direct connection between the code running on computers and the code running in biology—that all these biotech companies are directly reading and writing nucleotide sequences in and out of electronic memory, with almost no human intervention. That's more or less completely mechanized now, so there's direct translation, and once you translate to nucleotides, it's a small step, a difficult step, but, an inevitable step to translate directly to proteins. And that's Craig Venter's world, and it's a very, very different world when we get there.

The question of how and when humans are going to expand into the universe, the space travel question, is, in my view, almost rendered obsolete by this growth of a digitally-coded biology, because those digital organisms—maybe they don't exist now, but as long as the system keeps going, they're inevitable—can travel at the speed of light. They can propagate. They're going to be so immeasurably far ahead that maybe humans will be dragged along with it.

But while our digital footprint is propagating at the speed of light, we're having very big trouble even getting to the eleven kilometers per second it takes to get into lower earth orbit. The digital world is clearly winning on that front. And that's for the distant future. But it changes the game of launching things, if you no longer have to launch physical objects, in order to transmit life.

George Dyson, as always, provides an intellectually stimulating take on our code-saturated world. But I'm not convinced—at least not yet—that he's right when he talks of "autonomous, self-replicating codes" that are now "loose" in the world. Do our computer systems, and the codes they run, actually have any true autonomy? If a new plague were to wipe out the human race tomorrow, would software go on replicating? Maybe some of it would for a few days, and maybe embedded codes in certain machines would continue to rehearse their scripts a bit longer, but in short order all software would become inert. Biological and other physical processes would go on, oblivious to our disappearance, but computers and software would die with their makers. Software replicates because a person programmed it to replicate—even if that person might not have foreseen all the intricacies and consequences of the replication. Even the most virulent computer virus isn't playing out its own destiny; it has no volition beyond that of its maker. Like all our other technologies, software remains a conduit for human will and whim—and hence remains our responsibility. We still await, with no guarantee of its arrival, the missing link between the codes we write and the codes that write themselves. If Dyson is correct in saying that what we call the "digital universe" is in fact a new universe, then we must be gods. And I don't think we're gods.

Good comment by Nick Carr, and I agree with being skeptical, although Samuel Butler would argue that by this standard, polynucleotides like DNA and RNA are also not autonomous self-replicating codes since without the support of cellular metabolism they would only run for a short time before they ceased to exist or became inert. I used the word "autonomous" but I also used the word "symbiotic—life is both. And I certainly don't think we are gods—it's the exact opposite. Turing made that point, and I thought my sympathies with him were clear: with life as well as souls, "we are, in either case, instruments of His will providing mansions for the souls that He creates."